Best! Things! Ever!

When the old Dooce got her car broken into a few weeks ago, I read the hundreds and hundreds of comments from people sharing their own stories about how their cars got broken into, and my first thought was "wow, that's nice, I bet it makes you feel better to commiserate and know that the same thing has happened to other people too." My second thought was "hot damn, a lot of people sure have had their cars broken into. These odds don't look very good."

Shortly after September 11, 2001, I flew back to London to begin my final year at university. For three months, I slept on a futon in my friend Anna's spare room in a building with a doorman and a dishwasher, an apartment far nicer than I could have afforded on my meager student budget. Anna had finished with university already and had a real job and a boyfriend with a BMW, a boyfriend who only tolerated my presence in the apartment because Anna and I had known each other since we were seven.

So it sort of looks like we might be going to Ecuador in September. Did we book a flight? No. But I did accidentally buy the Lonely Planet book on Amazon yesterday and now it's here and I hate having to trek to the post office to mail things back, so I think we're sort of stuck with it now, which I guess means we're going to Ecuador.

So a pretty funny thing happened last night, although I'm not sure whether it'll translate for the Internet. Or, come to think of it, whether it'll actually be as funny at 7:12am (when one is drinking a large glass of water) as it was at 11:03pm (when one had been drinking small, strong glasses of cold limoncello.) Do you know how small these glasses were, by the way? They were tiny!

First of all, thank you so much for all your wonderful comments and e-mails on the Memorial Day post. Thank you for sharing these personal strands of your history with someone you've never met, for trusting your fragile fragments of family lore to a person who is really, for all intents and purposes, still just a voice inside the computer. I feel like each of you handed me not a story but a four-leaf clover, a bird's nest, a perfectly-formed bubble, and said "here is something precious; look after it." And I will. Thank you all so much again.

First, I feel compelled to tell you that before I could get started on this recap, I had to bribe myself with a large bowl of Thin Mint cookie ice cream in order to convince myself to relive the horrendous 90 minutes of lowest common denominator programming I had to sit through yesterday. (What, you didn't know the Girl Scouts made Thin Mint ice cream now, as well as regular Thin Mint cookies? Because they do. The bitches. It's alright for them; they're eight years old. They don't have hips. They don't care.)

Until around 9:34pm this evening, I thought (foolishly) that this had been the best part of my day:

And then, during a commercial break in Grey's Anatomy, I discovered this. And just like that, my new spring coat---despite costing only $35 at H&M and also, I am quite sure, being the color of heaven itself---became the second best part of my day. How wrong I was before 9:34pm! How ill-informed!

I wanted to tell you all about how much I'm loving my new job, how the people are so great, how it's just so much fun to have structure (and office supplies) in my life again, but I find that all my other thoughts are eclipsed by the fact that today is, apparently, Bagel Friday. Do you know what Bagel Friday is?

It's 7:30am and there are two skinny white boys sitting in a van outside my bedroom window. Which, I shall remind you again, is on the first floor, facing the street. These boys have dreadlocks which I am quite sure were paid for on Daddy's credit card. They have been blasting reggae music from the open window of their van for the last half hour. And I do mean "blasting"; I have tried adding my own music to the mix to cover it up, but The Shins just get drowned in the face of such pounding rasta beats.